Just because Little is small, that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed. Yes, you’ve seen the movie with, as critic Nathan Rabin called it, “the metaphysical bonk” that transforms a character in a magical way so they’re forced to reevaluate their entire life in order to deal with their outsized circumstances and grow as a person. But while Tina Gordon Chism’s movie is a little predictable and a little familiar, that doesn’t mean it’s unenjoyable. Little has a nice message about how the bullied become bullies themselves, and how those defense mechanisms mean that …

I'm a sucker for a good coming of age movie, and I mean a real coming of age movie, not these model-hot twenty-somethings playing teenagers falling in love for the first time. I'm talking about the movies about real kids moving into the first grown-up stage in their lives. I'm talking about stuff like Stand By Me, Bridge to Terabithia, My Girl, The 400 Blows and the more recent Eighth Grade. Maybe it's because that transition from child to not quite adult was the period of time that I began to discover the …